Welcome to Volume Two
You may have noticed we made a few changes.
Escapist Magazine Volume Two has been in the works for almost a year. I started trying to acquire the website from Defy Media last November. Early this year I teamed up with Enthusiast Gaming Media to complete the sale and relaunch the site. Today, here we are: a new website with some familiar faces, and variety of new contributors.
This is a humble beginning. We’re calling it a “beta”. There are parts of the new website we’re still working on, parts still to come, and parts we haven’t even thought of yet. The migration to a new platform using new technology has given us the ability to expand, experiment, and explore new ways of bringing you exciting Escapist content.
There have already been hiccups, and there are more to come. Escapist Magazine is almost 14 years old. The old site was running on a custom platform that was also almost 14 years old which had been worked on by dozens of developers over the years. It had issues.
My team and I discovered in August that we would need to expedite migration to a new platform in order to be able to simply run the website and publish more than a handful of stories and videos each week. What you see now is the fruit of six weeks or so of design and development. It is a work in progress.
As I wrote more than two months ago, when we announced that we would be re-launching the site:
As we work to bring Escapist Magazine back to life, we will honor some elements of our past even as we adapt to a new future. It’s been 13 years since the first issue Escapist Magazine. A lot can happen in 13 years, and a lot has happened: at Escapist, in games media, and to us, personally. Some of it good. Some of it bad. All of it is our history, and we must find some way to come to terms with that.
Today’s Escapist Magazine is not going to be what it was before. (Or even what it was before that.) I think you’ll be surprised, and even maybe a little enchanted with what we have planned. But a lot of what Escapist Magazine will be is still waiting to be discovered. I’m assembling an editorial team right now to help me discover it.
That team is now in place. Popular Escapist contributors Bob Chipman, Shamus Young, Grey Carter & Cory Rydell have returned to their old home. New contributors like Rob Lear are finding their new homes with us. We spend every day planning new and exciting things to publish. And we hope the voices we elevate and the vision we share will help make you feel at home as well.
I want to address a few frequently asked questions:
“Why don’t videos work on iPad/iPhone?”
We’ve had to switch all of our technology services. Our new video hosting service was not properly set to encode videos in an iOS-friendly format. We’ve fixed the problem, and will be re-uploading videos over the next 24 hours.
“Do you have a subscription model/system, or any intent to implement one? I really dislike advertisements, but want you folks to make money.”
This is something we’re looking at, but I don’t have an answer right now. Stay tuned.
“Where are the forums?”
We’re working on how to migrate the old forums to the new website. That’s a huge project, and we want to take the time to do it right. In the meantime, you can still view the forums and all of our original content at “Volume One”.
